


foreigner's god

by espressohno



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 21:02:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18668308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/espressohno/pseuds/espressohno
Summary: Pavel and Hikaru are stranded on an unoccupied, hostile planet as a result of a transporter glitch. As it becomes more and more evident that they might never be found, they have to come to terms with the fact that they could die there together. It changes them, and it starts to change their relationship too.(super angsty stranded and left-to-die fic with an undertone of enemies-friends-lovers, but not enough really to tag it. rated mature because the sex is in there but not explicitly. and there's a happy ending, i swear)





	foreigner's god

_Day 1_

Pavel rushed after Hikaru, the two of them nearly sprinting to the transporter room. The Captain was already planetside with an away team, and apparently the population there was in complete environmental crisis. It only half-coincided with the planet’s Starfleet file, which listed that the planet was primarily ocean and had a tendency to storms that made Earth hurricanes look like spring showers. It didn’t say that these monster hurricanes were paired with electrical storms as well.

It was probably against the Prime Directive, but Jim immediately signalled the Enterprise to call for supplies to be sent down immediately. The signals were warped and fuzzy and delayed, probably from the electrical storm. So once they finally got it on the bridge they hauled ass to the supply room.

“The Captain might have wanted us to stay on the bridge,” Pavel panted from behind him, “Since you are second in command after Spock.”

“His signals were urgent. I don’t want to waste time delegating when we know what to do already.”

He couldn’t really argue with that. There was a small group of officers trailing behind them as well, the group of them carrying all of the inclement weather supplies that they had stored away. Pavel couldn’t imagine it would be enough for what it looked like was going on down there. The swirling clouds covered almost all of the landmasses on the planet. It didn’t seem like storm tents and portable food replicators and rechargeable flashlights were going to help at this point.  

He got on the transporter pad, anyway. They stacked the survival kits into a large pile to be energized. Hikaru was speaking quickly and almost harsh to Scotty, but when Pavel looked over at him from the pile of supplies he could see that his eyes were betraying him. He looked worried. Really worried. It was hard not to see an officer of higher rank, the one who’d ordered him to come along, with so much fear in his face, and not start to worry too.

Pavel swallowed hard. He remembered his hand was still holding tight to the handle of one of the survival kits when they energized. He braced himself to beam right into the eye of the storm.

And then the light beams cleared and he blinked rapidly, moving his head in all directions, because where the _fuck_ were they. Somewhere with no storms, with no clouds at all.

And more importantly, with nobody else around.

It took him and Hikaru about a minute to come to the conclusion that they were not on the right planet. It took a few hours before they found a likely theory as to how that happened.

 

_Day 2_

Probably, they hypothesized, the electrical storm that interfered with the Captain’s signals in the beginning had also interfered with the transporter, landing them in another place altogether. At the very least, they ended up on a planet and not in the middle of space. What’s more, the air was breathable. Without those two things they would have been dead immediately.

But there weren’t a lot of good things about this planet. They could breathe, sure. But there wasn’t much else. The landscape was almost entirely red, cracked dirt, so hot and dry that a layer of dust sat on top of everything and blew around in the night breeze. Whatever star system they were in had three suns, which explained the heat. At almost all points of the day there was at least one sun in the sky. The night was only a few hours long, and only dark for a very short time in between the setting of the third sun and the rising of the first.

On the first day they covered as much ground as they could, and found the few things the planet had to offer other than dust and dirt. It must have been populated by some sort of wildlife, indicated by trails in the dirt and sounds of rustling that Pavel heard as he laid awake all night. There were trees, nothing like the ones Pavel knew from growing up on Earth. These trees were short and wide and just had barely enough leaves to create a small circle of shade around them. As weird as they looked, finding plants was a huge relief, because it meant that there had to be water somewhere.

By the second day they found a small creek, too narrow and too shallow to be called a river. The water cut deep into the dirt, deep enough that it was shaded by the walls around it.

They decided to stay by the creek, for now, while they figured out what to do next. Pavel sorted through the survival kit for all of the things they could use: a small water filter, a few days’ worth of replicated food, the just-add-water kind, a large tarp, a few meters of rope. The longer they stayed here, they’d probably find uses for the other things, which would have come in handy in the middle of a storm but didn’t do much good on a desert planet with three suns.

Pavel just hoped they wouldn’t have to get to that point.

 

_Day 10_

“We are lucky you know,” Pavel said one afternoon, as the first sun started to set and the temperature went from unbearably hot to bearably hot. They had given up on whatever they’d planned to get done that day. Instead they just sat under the shade of one of those fat, short trees near the creek, leaning against opposite sides so they didn’t have to look at each other.

But Pavel still had felt like he wanted to say something. Ten days in and Hikaru was already being a giant pessimist about everything, and Pavel felt like he should say it.

“Elaborate on that, would you?” Hikaru asked from the other end of the tree. In his voice Pavel could already hear that he was bound to disagree no matter how he responded.

“We can breathe the air, we can drink the water, and the weather is so hot but if it was cold instead we would be dead already.”

“You’re right,” Hikaru said, “Thank god we didn’t die right away or we wouldn’t have gotten to experience life on this miserable planet.”

Pavel sighed audibly.  

“Why are you so negative?”

“I’ve been in space longer than you. I know what our chances are of someone finding us out here.”

He could tell that Hikaru was waiting for him to acknowledge his _authority_ here, to stroke his ego by asking _so what are our chances?_ So Pavel didn’t ask. He just sat there fisting his hands in the red dirt, not caring anymore that it dusted his skin and turned him orange. The dust was everywhere, now. It covered the few possessions they had. It was in their clothes, in their hair, in their eyes by the end of each day and in their nostrils and mouths when they woke up in the morning.

“They’re zero, Chekov. Our chances are zero.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We don’t even know where we are. That transporter glitch had to have beamed us far enough to be in another star system for our communicators to lose signal. And that’s if we’re _lucky_ , you know. For all we know we’re not even in charted space. It could be years before--”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Fine. You brought it up.”

“I know. And I’m telling you: I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Pavel leaned his head back against the tree trunk and closed his eyes. He fought back the urge to cry, pushed the lump in his throat back down into his empty stomach. Now wasn’t the time for such things. First, because it would make him dehydrated, and second because Hikaru would probably do a shit job at handling it once he inevitably heard Pavel sobbing just a few feet away.

So he closed his eyes and sat perfectly still, as still as he possibly could, until he could feel just the faintest hint of a breeze in the air. By the time he opened his eyes again the first sun was totally set. In a few hours the second one would set, and then the third, and then they would get what little sleep they could in the short night before the suns rose again in succession. Pavel reminded himself again, as he thought about tomorrow and the next day and the next, day after day that would likely be spent doing little more than trying to survive and fighting with each other. He reminded himself again not to cry.

 

_Day 16_

The kit came with 10 days worth of food for one person, so about 20 vacuum-sealed bags of powdered food. In the beginning it felt like 20 days was going to be enough time for them to be found, or for them to die from something other than starvation, so they shared one meal per day.

Pavel could tell that they were both starting to lose it. The days felt longer here, and one half of one meal was as good as no food at all.   

They passed that day’s meal back and forth between them, after waiting as long as possible to eat. Pavel stared off into the distance, trying to distract himself while he chewed each bite of mushy, flavorless food as many times as possible. Suddenly he saw something, and maybe he was just tired and hungry and overheated and seeing things, but he was certain that he saw something move.

It came closer, slightly into view, and Pavel’s eyes went wide. It looked like some sort of animal, some bastardization of the wild pigs they have back on Earth. At least it looked closer to a pig than any animal Pavel knew, from Earth or otherwise. He didn’t know how long he’d been staring at it until Hikaru nudged his shoulder, trying to pass the food to him.

“What are you looking at.”

“Look, over there.” Pavel pointed at it. Hikaru squinted. “It’s an animal.”

“Huh.”

“Give me something sharp,” Pavel said before the thought was even completed in his mind.

“No.”

Pavel stood up. As if he was possessed by something, he walked over and rifled through their tent for that rock they’d used to dig into the ground.

“No, Pavel. We don’t do that anymore. We don’t _kill_ animals for food.”

“I think in this case we can make an exception.”

“Pavel, don’t.”

“Suit yourself. I won’t make you eat it.”

Rock in hand, sharp end pointed outwards, Pavel stalked towards the animal, his mind filtering out Hikaru’s protests and his own societal conditioning and the fact that he didn’t actually know how to hunt. What happened next felt like it was happening to someone else, someone who wasn’t slowly starving to death, someone who had the energy and the know-how to wrangle an unknown creature and kill it. The thing’s blood coated his uniform shirt, hot and wet against his skin as he carried it back.

 

-

 

That night with a clear head Pavel counted the days that had passed since the transporter glitch had first landed him here. Sixteen days. He had to count, because it would only drive him crazier if he didn’t.

 

_Day 39_

It didn’t take long for them to figure out some sort of a tent from the little supplies they had. They had a rope and a tarp and found a rock sharp enough to dig into the ground and that was all they needed. Or it was enough for a few days, after which Pavel assumed they would have been found and wouldn’t need to sleep on the dirt anymore underneath a too-small tarp which did nothing to keep out the dust and next-to-nothing to block out the sun. Even after the first week, they stayed in their little haphazard tent.

And then the second week. And then the third. It was as if neither one of them wanted to admit that building a better shelter would be a good idea, because admitting that meant accepting that they would be here for longer than they thought.

So they stayed, even though they woke up with dust in their mouths and sun in their eyes.

It wasn’t such a terrible price to pay in order to suspend their disbelief, until one night. Their 39th night sleeping in the tent next to the creek, they woke up to sounds of rustling and scraping, too loud for the meager wind to have caused. Pavel dismissed it at first, until he remembered that they were supposed to be alone on this planet. He felt around for one of the flashlights that came in the survival kit and turned it on, and then screamed.

“Jesus fuck what is it I was just asleep.”

Pavel didn’t say anything, he just ran out of the tent, only to see that there were more of them. They looked like they could have been rats, in some sort of gruesome mirror-universe. Ugly and scrawny and swarming around the leftovers of the last could-have-been-pig that Pavel and Hikaru had eaten that day.

Aside from gnawing at the bones of their leftovers, they were crawling into the tent, their tiny feet causing that rustling noise that had woken Pavel up. Pavel almost threw up at the sight of it, but he remembered how important it was to have food in his stomach and turned off the flashlight instead.

Hikaru rushed out just seconds after Pavel did.

“So why didn’t you tell me our tent was being invaded by rats,” he asked, as they stood and watched it from the other side of the creek. When the sun came up they had no choice but to witness those disgusting creatures try and find every edible bit of their pathetic little camp. Pavel just felt sick. Just as soon as he’d been able to sleep the whole night through on this miserable planet, something like this _had_ to happen.

“I screamed, didn’t I,” Pavel said, voice dry in every sense of the word.

They kept going at it for hours, and weren’t gone until long after Pavel and Hikaru had sat down on the ground, too tired to keep standing. By the time they scurried off to god-knows-where Pavel had been nauseous for so long it felt like his stomach had tied itself into a knot, and Hikaru was staring at their tent with enough intensity to kill a living creature.

“What do we do now,” Pavel said, and he regretted it as soon as Hikaru turned his head and directed the death glare at _him_. He must have made a face, because Hikaru finally just closed his eyes and sighed.

“Nothing. What the hell _can_ we do.”

Pavel looked out across the creek at their tent, at the cluttered supplies and bones laying around, the tiny footprint trails in the dirt. He stood up.

“We just have to rebuild it.”

“What’s the point,” Hikaru asked, dropping his head into his hands.

“So we can have a place to sleep and to keep our food,” Pavel said. He figured that much was obvious. Sure, maybe in the long run it didn’t matter if they were living comfortably when they were finally rescued, but in the meantime it would help them stay sane.

“And it will give us something to do until--”

Hikaru stood up, so fast that Pavel could see him nearly lose his balance. The fire in his eyes was back and aimed straight at him.

“Until what, Chekov? Until they find us?”

“Well--”

“Look around us, look at that,” he gestured across the creek, “we’ve been here for weeks already. Nobody is coming for us.”

“Thirty nine days.”

“What?”

“We’ve been here for thirty nine days.”

Hikaru dragged a hand down his face. He looked like he was about two seconds away from losing his mind. All things considered, it made sense. They were stranded and hungry and sleep deprived and they just woke up in the middle of the night to a swarm of rats. If Pavel wasn’t in shock he probably would have lost his shit, too.

“It’s going to be okay, Hikaru,” Pavel told him, and he knew instantly that it was the absolute worst thing he could have said. Hikaru dropped his hand from his face and nearly screamed at him.

“Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand that we’re going to die out here? Are you really so stupid that you think the Enterprise wouldn’t have found us by now?”

“I--”

“Nobody is coming for us! Don’t you get it? Don’t you--” Hikaru’s voice broke open before he could finish his sentence and he bent over, catching himself with his hands on his knees. He started breathing harsh, loud breaths that made his shoulders heave. Pavel just watched him with wide eyes, and then he realized that Hikaru was crying.

In all honesty, he had no idea what he was supposed to do. He’d already tried to comfort him once, and that only got him shouted at. So he did nothing. The same way he watched their camp be overrun by rats, shocked and sick and unable to move, he watched Hikaru fall apart. He fell forward onto his knees and continued to cry as he stared out into the emptiness beyond their camp, that hostile landscape that always served as a constant reminder that they were absolutely alone. His cries sounded nothing like Pavel was used to. It sounded more like he was choking, or drowning, or dry heaving, or maybe some combination of all three. This wasn’t the romanticized type of crying they showed in movies, with rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes. This was raw and real and horrifying. This was a man who believed he was going to die. And Pavel had no idea what to do. So he just watched.

 

_Day 40_

“We have to be friends,” Pavel said. They were leaning against that tree again, and Pavel had wanted so badly to comfort Hikaru while he was so emotional, but they really hadn’t been getting along since they got here. And that wasn’t good. If they were going to make it, they had to get along. They had to be able to comfort each other.

“I know,” Hikaru said, voice rough.

He was so tired that it still felt like it was the middle of the night, but the third sun was already rising over the horizon. Pavel looked over his shoulder to where Hikaru sat next to him, looking down at his hands.

“We have to be friends or we’re never going to make it.”

And if Hikaru wasn’t so exhausted from the night before, he probably would have argued with that last part, with the idea that _making it_ was even an option. Instead he just swallowed hard and nodded.

“We can be friends.”

“Good.”

 

_Day 41_

After that night they decided they might as well go look and see if there wasn’t a better place to set up camp. They hadn’t exactly explored the whole planet when they first arrived, stopping as soon as they found a little bit of water and a little bit of shade from the trees. This time they packed everything up and set out to find something better. A bigger river, at the very least.

“Maybe somewhere with a view,” Pavel said dryly as they walked. “Somewhere scenic to die.”

“I thought I was the negative one.”

“I was hoping that would sound like a joke.”

Hikaru shielded his eyes with his hand as they walked through what felt like miles of red, hot desert, the suns beating down on them a little more with every step.

“It’s hard to laugh in a place like this, I guess,” Hikaru said.

 

-

 

They were lucky, really, when the desert ended and the dirt got just a bit darker and trees started popping up more frequently. Even though their feet hurt and their skin burned they pushed on, and ended up surrounded by enough of those thick trees that Pavel called it a forest.

“There must be more water nearby,” Hikaru said, but he shrugged the weight off of his shoulders and dropped the supplies to the ground. “You stay here with our stuff, I’ll go take a look.”

“What, do you think somebody will steal it?” Pavel asked after him, and that was an even better joke but still Hikaru didn’t laugh.

 

_Day 60_

When they finally managed to wedge apart one of the trees they found that the inside retained so much water that you could pull the wood pulp out with just your hands. It was soft and malleable and they mixed it with dirt to fill the cracks in between the crudely cut pieces of wood they used to try and build a shelter. It was going to be a real one, this time, with four walls and a floor and a roof, which was maybe ambitious of them, but they quite possibly had the rest of their lives to build it.

The weeks spent slowly wedging apart pieces of strange wood and trying to construct a house with it were oddly satisfying. Every morning they woke up with something to do. They worked until their hands bled, until they couldn’t straighten their backs, until their stomachs threatened to implode and they were finally forced to stop and find something to eat. Then they went to bed underneath the trees and Pavel finally started to feel rested after the few hours of sleep they got during the planet’s short nights.

“They really didn’t teach us anything about survival in the Academy, did they,” Pavel said offhand one day, while they were working on the floor of the little cabin they were trying to build. They’d decided to raise it off of the ground, to avoid any issues with wildlife, which had forced them to redo all of their construction. They agreed it was worth it, though, and the floor looked a lot better the second time they built it.

“Nope,” Hikaru replied. He shoved their dirt and wood pulp mixture into the cracks of the floor. “I think if they admitted that something like this was possible, people would drop out.”

Pavel snorted. He finished his half of the floor and sat back on his heels, wiping the sweat from his forehead. Except he pressed his hand to his face and it wasn’t sweaty at all.

“Weird,” he found himself saying.

“What’s weird?”

“I’m not sweating. I’m always sweating.”

Hikaru shrugged from where he was bent over on the floor, and then he paused, and looked back up at Pavel, and this time he looked a little worried.

“What else are you feeling.”

“The same as always. My head hurts and I’m tired and I might throw up.”

“You’re nauseous?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not normal for you, though, is it?”

Pavel knit his eyebrows together. He thought about it, tried to remember if it was common nowadays for him to feel sick like this. He couldn’t remember complaining about it before, but he had been so busy in the past days that he didn’t notice it until now. It probably was nothing, though. They always felt bad here. That was just a fact of life.

“Why are you freaking out.”

“Because you might have heatstroke.”

That _was_ something they’d covered in Starfleet survival training, hypothermia and heatstroke and other environmentally-triggered issues. But Pavel was sure it wasn’t that. He was just tired after working under the suns all day, his skin dry and burned and his muscles overworked, but he wasn’t sick or anything. He couldn’t be. They had work to do.

“I think I just need some water,” he decided, and stood up.

And then he immediately fell over.

 

_Day 61_

Pavel woke up again and it must have been the next day. He was lying on the floor of the cabin, head rested against Hikaru’s rolled up uniform shirts. Hikaru must have finished the floor while Pavel was unconscious, and tied the tarp up as a makeshift ceiling to keep the sun out. It changed everything, being in the shade. If he wasn’t so thirsty Pavel would have been able to fall asleep again.

Instead he stayed awake and waited for Hikaru to come back. He felt so disoriented that it could have been hours, or days, before he finally did.

“Hey, you’re awake.” Hikaru’s words pulled Pavel back to reality from whatever heat-muddled limbo he’d ended up in. “I brought water.”

Pavel tried to sit up and Hikaru pushed him back down with a hand against his chest, keeping him there while he carefully poured water into Pavel’s mouth. It was the same as always, warm and metallic, but against his dry throat it felt so good. Pavel kept drinking until Hikaru ran out of water to give him and his stomach felt full with it.

“God, your heart is beating so fast.” Hikaru took his hand off of Pavel’s sternum, like touching him was somehow making it worse. Pavel was worried he would leave again and felt weirdly content when he watched Hikaru sit down next to him instead, head almost touching their tarp roof.

“How do you feel?”

“Bad,” Pavel croaked. His head and his heart were pounding off-beat from each other, his skin felt hot and cold at the same time, he didn’t know if he could even lift his arms, and on top of that he was starting to feel like he might throw up all that water he just drank. Bad didn’t really do justice to how he felt. Still, he must have made his point somehow. He could see Hikaru’s expression recoil a little from guilt.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’m just upset that we had to stop working.”

“We were working too hard.”

“Probably true.”

“I’m sorry,” Hikaru said again. Pavel watched him chew nervously on his thumbnail. He saw the cuts on his hand, barely healed, from weeks of trying to build a house without proper tools. Eventually the cuts would become white scars against their sun-darkened skin. Blisters would turn to calluses. Every soft and vulnerable part of them that was allowed to exist in the safety of a starship would be hardened.

“Why do you keep saying that.”

Hikaru looked down at his lap.

“I ordered you to beam down with me. To help the Captain. It’s because of me that you ended up here. So I’m sorry.”

“God. Shut up.”

Pavel closed his eyes so he didn’t have to keep looking at him. And so the room would stop spinning and his stomach would stop turning. Maybe if he was lucky he’d fall asleep.

“I mean it.”

“And I mean it: shut up.”

“I just feel fucking guilty, okay?” Hikaru said a little too loud, his voice starting to unravel. Pavel opened his eyes again so he could squint at him. Glare, really.

“If we start talking about things that _could_ have happened, we will never stop, and then we will want to die.”

That was apparently enough to shut Hikaru up, because he must have known that Pavel was right. He just nodded, and then they sat there in silence until Pavel fell asleep.

 

_Day 123_

“How does it look?”

“Stop moving your head,” Hikaru griped, “It looks fine.”

“You have to promise me that you won’t make me look bad.”

“Why do you care what you look like? I’m the only other one here.”

Pavel huffed, but he obeyed, keeping his head as still as possible. Of all of their crude tools that they’d come up with to build the cabin, Hikaru had managed to make a pretty sharp blade from the supplies in the survival kit. After weeks of Pavel’s hair being so long he had to keep blowing it out of his face while he worked, he finally just asked Hikaru if he would cut it.

“I’m not a hairdresser, you know.”

“How bad is it.”

“That’s not me saying it’s bad I’m just saying I’m not a hairdresser.”

Hikaru had a point, though. He was the only one who actually had to look at Pavel, so it really didn’t matter if his hair looked good, it only mattered that it was out of his face. Really, Pavel’s thick, curly hair which he prided himself on before was not suited to this environment. Locks of hair fell into his eyes and it made his head and neck so warm throughout the day that he wished he could just shave it all off. He rejected that thought at first, out of fear, and then forced it back into his mind.

It wasn’t like he had anyone to impress.

“Can you cut it all off,” Pavel finally asked.

“What, like a buzzcut?”

“Yes.”

“I can try.”

Pavel’s hands weren’t as steady as Hikaru’s, but he tried his best to do a good job in return, tried not to cut him as he held the blade so close to his skin. Maybe in a little while, once they got better at this, Pavel would ask Hikaru to try and shave the patchy, sparse facial hair that he could feel growing in. But for now the buzzcut was enough, it was lighter and kept him cool. If he was back on the ship, or on Earth, or literally anywhere else, he would have recoiled in disgust at the idea of shaving his head. But here, he found that he didn’t actually give a shit anymore.

He looked at the curls of hair covering the ground, and found himself letting go of that part of his identity almost too easily.

 

_Day 127_

After the first time Pavel got sick from heat exhaustion, the sickness seemed to keep coming back. It made him wonder if it wasn’t actually heat stroke, but something else, another cruel gift this planet gave him along with becoming a carnivore and cutting his hair off and burning and tanning his skin to a shade he didn’t even recognize. It could be some sort of disease, the kind that settles in your blood and comes back whenever it wants.

He spent another two days sick and shaky and hot on his sleeping mat, thinking about an elective course he’d taken at the Academy about alien diseases. It was too bad he’d never get the chance to be written about in a later version of the textbook. Because he was sure there was nothing like this in the curriculum.

“You don’t have an alien disease,” Hikaru replied when Pavel told him his thoughts about being put in the alien diseases textbook. He covered Pavel’s forehead with a wet cloth, a piece that had probably been torn from Pavel’s uniform shirt although now it was too bleached and frayed to be sure. The moisture immediately soothed Pavel’s headache.

“Then why does it keep coming back.”

“Because your immune system is weak. Whatever the hell is in these plants and animals we’ve found to eat here, you’re probably vitamin deficient.”

“If I’m vitamin deficient, then _you’re_ vitamin deficient too.”

Hikaru breathed out a laugh. He took his own uniform shirt from off of his bed and waved it back and forth near Pavel’s head, sending a soft little breeze in the air. Pavel sighed softly and closed his eyes.

“So why don’t _you_ get sick,” he asked quietly, sleep starting to pull at his limbs.

“I don’t know. Maybe because I grew up in a hotter climate than you.”

Pavel felt himself smiling.

“San Francisco is Siberia compared to this place.”

The last thing Pavel heard before sleep took him under was Hikaru’s quiet laughter again.

 

_Day 175_

“What if the pile of supplies had beamed down here with us?” Pavel asked while they cooked one afternoon over the fire. “I still wonder about where it went.”

Hikaru grunted noncommittally. He turned the meat slowly over the fire. By now the smell of it actually made Pavel’s mouth water. He had only ever eaten replicated, imitation animal products, which were agreed to be as good as the real thing. Maybe it was because this wasn’t an Earth animal, but the taste had been so strange the first night he killed and ate one that he almost felt sick.

Now he was impatient for it to cook. He tried to distract himself.

“Do you think it went to the right place.”

“I don’t fucking know.”

“Don’t you think about it?”

“Honestly, Pavel, I try my best not to.” Hikaru watched the fire so closely that Pavel could see the flames reflected in his eyes. “And you were right that we shouldn’t talk about the hypotheticals.”

“I know I was right, but now I want to talk about them.”

Hikaru looked up at him.

“Well can you wait until I’ve eaten before we unpack our existential dread.”

“Sure.”

 

-

 

“What if we were beamed into an alternate timeline. This could be the same planet that the Captain was on just at a different time.”

“God,” Hikaru laughed, “That’s a good one.”

Pavel grinned at him.

“Your turn,” he said.

“Okay. What if we beamed into another reality.”

“Isn’t that like, the same thing.”

“No, I mean what if this is the same planet at the same _time,_ but in an alternate reality.”

That one wasn’t as good as Pavel’s, but he didn’t mention it. Hikaru was in a pretty good mood for once. He watched him relax after a day spent working under the suns. The evening was sending the second sun down behind the trees and the air finally started to cool. Hikaru looked oddly focused as he pushed ashes around the fire pit with a stick. He had lost some of the life in his eyes that he used to have on the ship, not to mention the life in his entire body in general, but sometimes Pavel caught him looking at things with almost the same intensity as he did before.

“It’s your turn,” Hikaru said after a few minutes.

“What if we entered a time loop, and after ten years the transporter glitch will send us back onto the Enterprise and no time has passed since we left.”

“Ten years is optimistic.”

“You haven’t totally converted me to a pessimist, you know,” Pavel smirked at him, and Hikaru looked up from drawing letters in the ashes and his eyes crinkled a little bit like he maybe was glad Pavel was still an optimist.

 

_Day ?_

Pavel woke up one morning and realized that he lost count of the days. He couldn’t remember when he had stopped counting, only that the last number he’d had in his head was 201 and he had no idea how many nights had passed since then.

He felt like a zombie the entire day. Something in him must have died when he realized he had stopped counting, when he realized he had one less thing to keep him sane.

Night fell and he couldn’t even sleep. He climbed down from the cabin and hit the dirt with his bare feet. Walking through the trees, to the edge of the small forest where it met the wide, endless desert, he thought about his childhood, about the nights when he couldn’t sleep and would wander downstairs into his mother’s bed.

She never looked annoyed when he would wake her up on those nights. She only pulled him up into her bed, into the eternal warmth of her arms, and taught him how to pray.

His mother never succeeded in raising him to be religious, but she at least left him with a curious habit, on sleepless nights, of praying to a god that he didn’t really believe in. It happened less and less, when he lived on the Enterprise, but it never totally stopped.

“God isn’t real,” Pavel muttered to himself, the closest thing he could manage to how he used to pray out loud in his mother’s arms.

“You’re not real,” he said again. He looked out into the horizon where the dawn of the first sun was slowly creeping up. The night would be over soon, and another day would start and he would have no way to know which day it even was. He could have been here for a year already.

“You’re not real, or how could you let this happen to me. To my mother. She believes in you, and you killed her son.”

All of a sudden he felt angry. He wished there was something he could do to make himself feel better, some way for him to take his anger out on this god who he was still talking to despite his own disbelief.

Pavel Chekov was a man of science. He was a man of equations and algorithms and formulas that all kept the universe in order. Everything could be explained. There was no room for god. And yet, in his most desperate, miserable hours, he still found himself talking to god. This was something he would never want anyone to know, something that made him feel foolish even while he did it.

“I hope she forgets about you,” he spat out, and it only made him feel guilty. How else would his mother find comfort after she realized that she would never see her son again?

He felt angry and guilty and stupid and he mostly just started to wish that religion would _work_ for him for once. Tonight had been no different. It felt like he was speaking into a void, a void which apparently helped other people but didn’t give a shit about him.

He stalked back to the cabin and laid wide awake for the rest of the night and half of the morning before falling into a hot, sweaty, and dreamless sleep.

 

_Day ?_

“I never got to say goodbye to my parents,” Hikaru said one night, as if he’d just realized it. “Or my sisters. They probably think I’m dead.”

“My family, too.”

Pavel looked up into the darkness, to the ceiling which he could barely make out in the dark. Even with such long days, even after building a real structure to sleep in that kept out the light of the first sunrise, they still seemed to have so much trouble sleeping. Maybe it was because the night kept bringing them thoughts like this.

“I never got to finish my five year mission,” Pavel offered.

“It’s not that exciting, not like graduating from Starfleet or whatever. You finish it and then realize you don’t want to be anywhere else and sign up for another one.”

Pavel hummed. That probably was what he’d have done anyway.

“At least, that’s what I did,” Hikaru said.

“It’s your turn again.”

“Okay,” Hikaru thought for a second, apparently getting on board right away with this little game of naming all of the things they would never do, even though underneath that sentiment was the assumption that they would never make it out of here. “I never got to have kids of my own. I always wanted that.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know.” Hikaru laughed. “I think I just figured I’d start with one and then see how I felt.”

“Makes sense.”

“Your turn.”

“I never got promoted from Ensign.”

“Enough of the ship stuff. Don’t you care about anything else?”

Pavel paused. He had already mentioned his family. Between missing his mother and missing the Enterprise there wasn’t really much else. Except for one thing. He almost didn’t say it, because he was worried it might make things awkward, but the two of them had been through so much already that he decided it wasn’t worth getting embarrassed with the person you were probably going to die with.

“I never fell in love. Not even once.”

“Really?”

“Never did anything like that.”

“I always thought you had a thing for the Captain.”

Pavel felt his cheeks heat up and was grateful that they were still in the dark.

“You totally did, didn’t you.”

“Who doesn’t, okay?” Pavel nearly whined. Hikaru laughed.

“No, no, I get it. He’s hot.”

“But that wasn’t love that I felt for him. I think it was only physical. And I wanted to be a captain myself someday, so maybe it was something like that as well.”

“Interesting,” Hikaru said, and then, “So you’ve never had sex, either?”

“I think it’s your turn, isn’t it,” Pavel said flatly. He really wasn’t in the mood to talk about his virginity at a time like this. It was hard enough when he realized a while ago the likelihood that he actually might die a virgin.

“Alright, fine, I kind of wanted to get a tattoo before this happened.”

“That’s a lame one.”

“Well it’s true.”

“You just wanted to say something so you can make fun of me for being a 20 year old virgin.”

“I wasn’t going to make fun of you,” Hikaru said, “Also, you might be 21 now.”

“Whatever. It was just easier, on the ship, to forget about those things, you know.”

“Have you kissed anyone?”

“Barely.”

Hikaru was quiet for a moment. Pavel almost assumed that they were done with this conversation until he broke the silence with,

“Do you want to kiss me?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you.”

“Nothing. I’m just offering, if you want to.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny.”

“So what, you want to kiss me too?”

“Yeah. Why not.”

“I can’t believe you.”

 _Why not_ . It was almost as bad as saying something like _might as well_. Like they were stuck together on this miserable planet for the rest of their lives with nothing to do all day and making out was what, another way to fill the time?

Pavel shook his head, closed his eyes and decided it was time to try and get some sleep. But the thoughts crept back in, the reality of how alone he was, how alone he had always felt at the end of the day, even on the ship. He didn’t even have time for a real relationship on the Enterprise, but he always used to wonder if physical touch wouldn’t have at least helped somehow. Finally he just sighed. He hoped that Hikaru might have fallen asleep by the time he decided to bring it up again.

“Do you still want to?” He asked quietly.

It was silent for a few seconds. Maybe Hikaru was asleep.

“Sure.”

He didn’t realize until that moment, closing the distance between their makeshift beds, how close they actually were at night while they slept. Less than a foot away, really, cramped inside their small little shelter. It felt like the walls were closing even tighter around them, somehow, when Pavel climbed on top of Hikaru and pressed his lips to where he assumed his mouth would be.

It was close, at least, and he kissed the side of his upper lip, felt the stubble that had finally started to grow in since he’d shaved the last time, maybe a few weeks before. Pavel liked that Hikaru couldn’t seem to grow a beard either. It made him feel weirdly better about himself. Hikaru wasn’t tall and big and manly and authoritative like so many command officers tended to be. It felt like they were equals, even though Pavel knew he had experience, physical experience, that he didn’t have himself.

But it didn’t seem like Hikaru cared. He didn’t laugh when Pavel’s mouth crashed against his upper lip. Instead he just took Pavel’s chin in his hand, guiding him to the right place.

Pavel had kissed only a few people in his life, enough to count on one hand, and it was never right. It was always awkward or uncomfortable or someone had bad breath or they weren’t in the right place at the right time and it lasted only a second. None of them were good, anyway, which is why this kiss with Hikaru almost felt like it was his first one.

And maybe it was because neither of them had had something like this in so long, because they were stranded and miserable and as good as dead. Maybe because the only other option the two of them had was to go to sleep and wake up to another aimless day of trying to stay alive. Whatever it was, whether it was everything at once or something else entirely, they kissed and Pavel considered for the first time that there could be something more to this life than food and water and sleep and sweat. And he knew Hikaru had the same thought, because soon he was reaching his other hand to Pavel’s back, pulling them close, slipping his tongue into Pavel’s mouth and smiling against his lips when he heard Pavel breathe in sharply.

Against all of the confusion in his head, Pavel decided to just let himself enjoy it.

 

_Day ?_

The next day was surprisingly not awkward. They woke up mid-morning and Pavel was still on top of Hikaru and they just didn’t really bring it up. Things weren’t awkward between them after their little makeout session, but they definitely weren’t the same, either.

Pavel caught himself that afternoon, as they collected water by the river, staring at Hikaru. He’d never thought before about whether or not he was attractive. It didn’t really seem relevant when they were stranded in a hostile environment. Last night in Hikaru’s bed was probably the first time he’d been aroused since he was on the ship, and it hadn’t had anything to do with how Hikaru looked.

And on the ship--well, Hikaru had been right about Pavel’s crush on Jim Kirk. Pavel couldn’t remember if he had ever thought about Hikaru like that in the three years they worked together at the helm. He really didn’t know him that well. They were very different people, and outside of work they spent their time differently. Maybe after enough time, when he got over his whole Jim Kirk hero worship thing, he could have ended up redirecting his attention to Hikaru.

Or maybe it would have never happened. It was pretty likely that this was all a result of the fact that they were stuck here together.

Still, he kept glancing over at Hikaru that day. He tried to think of what Hikaru looked like all those months ago. Pale skin, neat hair, uniform always clean and perfect. He had this look on his face all the time at work, no matter what happened, an expression of calm as if he always knew what he needed to do.

This Hikaru wasn’t quite the same. He was a lot thinner, now, with wiry muscles along his arms and shoulders from manual labor. His skin was rough and scarred and brown from the countless months of sun exposure. Even in the sunken lines of his face, though, when he worked Pavel still saw that same calm expression sometimes. While he filtered water for them a little at a time, into one of the wooden buckets they carved to store water back at the cabin, he looked like he could have been doing any other task, like he was back on the ship following orders.

His hair was starting to grow back a little bit from the last time Pavel cut it. Pavel remembered sinking his fingers into it the night before, the short, dark strands that were still warm from the sun that day. He remembered pulling them and hearing Hikaru moan into his mouth.

They had let go of wearing their shirts a long time ago, because of the heat and because they made better use as pillows, but they still spent most of the day in their uniform pants and boots. Pavel wondered if underneath his slacks Hikaru’s skin was still pale like it had been on the ship. He had reached his hand underneath the waistline while they kissed and felt the soft skin over his hip bone, the hair leading down to his groin. He fidgeted for the right angle and wrapped his hand around Hikaru’s cock. He could still remember the way his voice sounded when he’d said into his ear _are you sure you want this?_ and Pavel nodded into his neck. He remembered the way Hikaru pressed their mouths together as he came, bordering on desperate.

He wondered if these things could have ever happened between them if they hadn’t ended up here. Probably not, he decided.

 

_Day ?_

It became a habit, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise. But when Hikaru started reaching for him at night after they went to bed, he was still a little surprised. He figured the first time was just a courtesy. After so many nights in a row, though, it became clear that this was just going to be a part of it now, a part of their lives on this planet.

Pavel would be lying if he said it didn’t make things a little bit better. He had something to look forward to, at least, even though he wasn’t really sure what the actual feelings were behind it. Hikaru’s arms around him, though, his hands across his skin, his mouth on him, it became the best part of his day. He didn’t realize until a while after they’d started doing it that now he qualified as sexually active, because everything about their situation was so far from what he’d imagined for himself.

But it made things better. So he went with it. And when Hikaru kissed him awake in the middle of the night, he kissed back.

 

_Day ?_

“Were you ever religious?” Pavel asked one morning, trapped in his bed underneath Hikaru’s naked body. When they first got here it probably would have made them too warm to be so close to each other, but now he didn’t even care. He liked the feeling of Hikaru on top of him, liked the weight of him, keeping him pressed against the floor. Judging by the light coming through the cracks in the ceiling, it was only the first sunrise, so it was just starting to get hot in the cabin.

“Nope. I’ve maybe been to church once in my life.” Hikaru pushed himself up on one elbow. “Why.”

“Do you think god could exist?”

Hikaru looked like he was actually thinking about it. If it was anyone else Pavel knew from the ship, they probably would have laughed at him. But Hikaru didn’t laugh. He liked how Hikaru didn’t laugh at him.

“I don’t know. Maybe if I lived on a better world than this one it’d be easier to imagine.”

“So you think god would be loving?”

“Well no god would have put us out here to die, that’s for sure.”

Pavel pursed his lips. Hikaru’s hand found his face, his cheek, tracing the line of his mouth with his finger.

“Why are you thinking about this?”

“I can’t help it. All I can do here is think.”

Hikaru chuckled at that and shook his head. Pavel squinted at him but otherwise let it slide, let him continue to trace the lines of his face with his rough fingertips.

“I think god would be impartial. Human matters probably seem unimportant compared to the whole universe.”

“You really think about this a lot, don’t you.”

“We’re here because of a transporter accident. Because of an electrical storm. God was probably just sitting back and watching it happen.”

“So you _do_ believe in god,” Hikaru said, and again he didn’t laugh at Pavel for this.

“No.” Pavel sighed. “I don’t know. But if I did believe in god, that’s what I would believe.”

Hikaru just nodded, and then pressed their mouths together, and Pavel forgot about god for the rest of the morning.

 

_Day ?_

At this point the few electronics that they had with them were totally dead. Both of their communicators had lost their charge within the first month, although that was mostly Pavel’s fault for continuing to try to use them, just in case one day they happened to work. He would walk out of their tent once he was sure Hikaru was asleep and send out signal after signal, just in case. When they finally died Hikaru shrugged it off, saying that they were useless whether they worked or not. There were a few other items in the survival kit Pavel had beamed down with: two flashlights that were powered by a small crank so they never lost battery, a small space heater, a radio for sending help signals, and a ray gun for sending manual signals into the atmosphere. All things designed for survival and rescue from a storm.

Pavel was having one of those days where the threat of heatstroke lingered like a floating dagger. He could feel it as soon as he woke up, and Hikaru ordered him to stay inside. It’s not like they had that much to do that day anyway. Other than finding food and water they never had anything to do. But Pavel was stuck inside and he felt useless and bored and a little bit sick.

So he took inventory of these things that they couldn’t use, broken and dead electronics and devices that were no help on a desert planet with three suns. He put aside the ray gun, because somewhere in his head he still held out the hope that one day they would get a chance to use it. Everything else, the communicators, the flashlights, the heater, the radio, he started to take apart.

At first it made him feel better. It felt like he was doing actual work, like when they were building the cabin and everything they did in those days left them feeling satisfied and productive.

And it gave him something to do other than contemplate life and listen to the rhythmic pounding of his headache. With shaky fingers he disassembled everything to its most basic pieces. Once they were all spread out on the floor in front of him, he wiped the sweat from his forehead and started to think of what he could build.

He was pulled back into reality by the sounds of Hikaru coming back, adding to their water stores and starting to cook dinner. Or lunch. It was hard to name the meals they ate on this planet, but Pavel was sure it had been hours since they’d had breakfast and Hikaru left for the day, hours he spent in a trance picking apart electronics and putting them back together.

He had cuts on his fingertips and nothing he had tried seemed to work. The cranks from the flashlights weren’t able to power the radio, like he’d wanted. The hardware from the heater was absolutely useless. He had spent the entire day turning already useless things into garbage.

Hikaru climbed up to meet him and he didn’t look up, tried to stay focused on doing something useful, making _something_ after all this time. The longer he’d been at it the more he started to lose hope, the more he cut his fingers and the blood made the screws and wires and metal pieces slip from his hands. Hikaru just watched him at first, probably trying to process what kind of sick-brain he was on that had caused him to do this for an entire day.

“What are you doing,” he finally asked, and Pavel was forced to ask himself the same question as he tried to find an answer. He didn’t know. He had no idea. In all honesty he had wasted an entire day doing nothing, and now their flashlights were broken.

“I…” Pavel started, he looked up at Hikaru, who stood just a few feet away from the entrance, and then looked back down at his hands. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore, even though they were red and bleeding and probably _should_ be in pain.

“I--I--” he tried again. He tried to come up with words to explain why he’d ended up like this, why he woke up this morning feeling too sick to do the simple tasks of daily survival but wouldn’t just sleep instead, why he looked at their electronics that already weren’t going to help them off this planet in any capacity and thought that by taking them apart he could change that fact. He tried to explain, to himself, why he still thought that there was anything he could do that would get them home.

He opened his mouth to say another word and the only thing he managed to do was take a breath, and then another, and then he choked, and his throat went tight and he couldn’t breathe at all. He fell forward onto his hands and knees and started sobbing.

Pavel was always sensitive, ever since he could remember, but he had gotten good at handling it by the time he started his five year mission. Things would affect him but he’d just hold it inside, keep it there, sit on it until he was alone in his quarters and it was finally appropriate to cry. Sometimes he’d have to hold things in for so long that he turned into a complete mess once he was alone, collapsed into bed and screamed into his pillow and felt like a hopeless, sensitive child who shouldn’t be allowed to sit at the helm and navigate a starship. And then he’d go to sleep, and wake up the next morning, and go back to work.

Even the most traumatic experiences he’d had on the ship, watching the destruction of Vulcan, believing that the Captain was dead, only took a good cry, and then Pavel was ready to get back to work. But this, this was like nothing he’d ever felt.

It was like something shattered inside of him. Something broke and he felt himself lose the last piece of hope that he didn’t know he still had. His stomach twisted and his heart tore itself into pieces and his hands and feet went cold and he realized that he really, truly had no reason anymore to believe that they weren’t going to die here. No reason to believe that they could still be found. He had lost count of the days since they got here, and even if he hadn’t, the days probably weren’t even 24 hours anyway. The number of days someone on the ship could have counted was probably different. He would never know. Maybe nobody would ever know.

He came back to reality for the second time and realized he was still sobbing, screaming, picking up the bits and pieces around him and throwing them against the wall. Hikaru must have been too shocked at first to do anything except for watch. A few more seconds passed of Pavel falling apart on the floor and Hikaru standing on the other side of the cabin and then he was running towards him.

Hikaru took the sharp pieces of the communicator out of his hands, pushing Pavel’s arms tightly against his own chest so he didn’t hurt himself again. Then he pulled him forward into his arms. Hikaru wrapped so tightly around him that Pavel could feel how much he was shaking. He cried against Hikaru’s shoulder, tasting salt and sweat and dust in his mouth. He cried until he thought he’d be sick, and then slowly dissolved into heaving, coughing, shaky breaths until he finally had nothing left in him.

Through all of it, Hikaru had been completely silent. He only sat there and held Pavel in his arms as the grief tore through him. Once Pavel had calmed down enough that he could inhale and exhale without letting out another sob, Hikaru spoke, or maybe it was just the first time that Pavel was able to hear him.

“I’m here,” he said, and that was all he could say, really. Any of the typical words of comfort, _It’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it, everything will be fine, we’ll figure something out,_ they were all too good to be true. Hikaru had reached this point before Pavel did, way before, back when Pavel still counted their days and still went outside at night to try to use the communicator to find help. He knew that it wasn’t going to be okay. It was only going to be this, every day, until they eventually died out here.

The only thing that made it better was that they weren’t alone.

“I’m here,” Hikaru said again, almost like he was reassuring himself too. Pavel let his forehead fall against Hikaru’s shoulder, closing his eyes, and let the words wrap around his thoughts. “I’m here.”

 

_Day ?_

The first day when Pavel went outside and saw a cloud in the sky he could hardly contain his excitement. As long as they’d been on this planet, which he didn’t even know anymore, the sky had always been clear. And here it was, a single cloud, just the smallest wisp of white and gray. Pavel had a great day after that. He wasn’t exactly sure why.

Maybe because clouds meant rain, but day after day passed with no rain, even as more little wispy clouds started to appear.

The first one was exciting, but the others only teased him. After what felt like a month of stripes of clouds forming and never letting go of the rain, he got tired of it. He decided there may as well be no clouds at all. Then he hated how negative he had become.

 

_Day ?_

The two of them didn’t really talk during sex, except for the necessary things. Like checking in on each other, making sure what they were doing was okay and felt good. In theory, it was all they needed.

But Pavel almost felt himself wanting more, wanting to hear things he knew Hikaru wouldn’t say. It was his fault for being sensitive and romantic and still having all of these secret dreams about what sex would be like for him. He knew he wasn’t going to ask Hikaru for anything more than he already felt compelled to give, and usually he was fine keeping those desires under wraps. He could still enjoy it anyway. Even though deep down there was a part of him that wanted to hear Hikaru say how much he wanted him, how attractive he was, how good he made him feel. He wanted Hikaru’s voice low in his ear making sweet confessions like that, turning him on and saying more than just _is this good_.

“Is this good,” Hikaru asked, mumbling so close against his neck that Pavel could feel his mouth move. Hikaru’s hand was wrapped around both of their dicks, stroking and holding them pressed together as he slowly rocked back and forth. Pavel nodded his head yes, and realized that Hikaru might not have felt it.

“Yes, yes, it’s good.”

“I like it too,” Hikaru whispered, and Pavel let that be enough, let the words translate in his head into _I like you, too._ The friction of Hikaru’s hand and the line of his cock and the words in Pavel’s mind that he hadn’t even said were enough to push him over the edge.

 

_Day ?_

The good thing about all those clouds in the sky, although they taunted him by refusing to rain, was that the suns were covered up and the air cooled down. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but it was definitely noticeable, and enough that Pavel was able to settle down in the middle of the day and take a nap. He woke up warm and heavy and still tired, and he realized it was because Hikaru had pushed him awake.

Hikaru’s hand was still on his shoulder, shaking him, and Pavel whined.

“Wake up.”

“I was napping,” he said, keeping his eyes closed in protest.

“Don’t you hear that?”

“Hear what.”

“Listen.”

Pavel kept his eyes closed but tried to wake up the rest of his brain, tried to focus his ears to whatever sound Hikaru expected him to hear. After a few seconds he realized there _was_ a sound coming from outside. A tapping sound, like something was hitting the roof of their cabin again and again, a million little taps at once.

And then he smelled it too.

He opened his eyes and Hikaru’s face was bright, almost like he was smiling. His hand still wrapped around Pavel’s shoulder and as he started to wake up Pavel could feel the stickiness in the air, the moisture.

“Is that…?”

Hikaru nodded.

“Oh my god.”

He shot up to his feet and they rushed outside together, into the rain. Pavel had been half asleep not a minute earlier but all of a sudden, as soon as the water hit his skin he felt like he was being brought back to life. He laughed at how ridiculous it all seemed, at how happy he was just from the _rain_.

He felt the most peculiar urge to run, so he did, bare feet slapping against the dirt and kicking up mud. Hikaru caught up with him, and then they raced. They ran and laughed and danced until they were out of breath, and then Pavel stood out in the open desert, tilted his face to the sky, and just breathed.

Hikaru seemed to understand. He had run when Pavel ran, laughed when he laughed, and now he came up beside him and turned his face up and felt the rain with him. It poured down harder, every drop hitting his face like a tiny needle, but still he didn’t move. He wanted to feel every second of this rain, from beginning to end, until the clouds were empty and the suns came out and everything dried up again.

Pavel felt Hikaru’s hand slipping into his own, and he felt himself smiling, and he felt that same sensation for a second time, like the rain was bringing him back to life.

 

_Day ?_

“Which one of us will die first from skin cancer, do you think,” Pavel asked. Hikaru gave him a sort of incredulous look. Pavel shrugged. It wasn’t a ridiculous thing to mention, considering the context. They were washing themselves off in the river, something they never did at first for fear of what could be in the water, but now the possibility of being poisoned seemed like a fair price to pay for feeling clean.

Or cleaner, at least. It wasn’t like they had soap.

But when they took their clothes off and Pavel saw again the rather dramatic difference in skin tone from the line at Hikaru’s waist where his slacks hit, he felt like it was a fair question.

“I think we’ll die of something else before the skin cancer catches up to us,” Hikaru finally said.

That was a good point.

“Like what?”

“Like whatever toxic minerals could be in this water,” Hikaru said, and splashed Pavel in the face with it. Pavel gasped and spluttered and splashed him right back. Hikaru let out a bark of laughter.

“I think if the water was poisonous we would already be dead.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s a slow poison.”

“So on the same level as the skin cancer. Give me something more urgent.”

Hikaru thought for a second. He bent his knees enough to dip his shoulders underwater. The water wasn’t exactly refreshing; it sat under the sun too long for that. And there was something metallic about it, almost coppery, which kept Pavel from ever _really_ feeling clean, but once he got used to it, it wasn’t so bad. Pavel tipped his head back and wet his hair with it again, trying to massage the dirt out with his hands.

“Killed by an alien pig. Eaten by alien rats.”

“Do you think we’ve ruined their ecosystem, here?”

Hikaru waved his hand above the water dismissively.

“They’ll recover once we die.”

Months ago Pavel would have felt his heart sink to his stomach if they found themselves talking to nonchalantly on the certainty of death. He would have forced them to change the subject so he could continue to ignore the possibility of it. Now it was just another conversation topic, the same as anything else.

They already talked about life on Earth and life on the Enterprise and even their shitty life here, about memories and past experiences and missed opportunities and all the things they would never get to do or never have again. That was all depressing, so why draw the line right before they got to the good part of debating the gruesome details of their inevitable death?

Pavel watched Hikaru closely while he waited for the next idea, but it looked like he was out of them.

“What if I kill you,” Pavel asked, trying to keep his voice serious.

Hikaru just splashed him again with the coppery river water.

 

_Day ?_

They sat and watched the fire go out, maybe because they were too tired to climb up into bed, or because the had too much energy to go to sleep. It had been a pretty uneventful day. Pavel felt like he was waiting all day just for the day to end. More and more days were passing lately where he felt like that.

He leaned against one of the pillars holding the cabin up, stretching his legs out in front of him, and watched the flames slowly get smaller and smaller.

“Why do I feel like I’m not being productive today.”

Hikaru looked up at him from across the fire pit. He had his knees pulled up to his chest with his arms crossed over them, like he was containing himself into the smallest shape possible. He looked like he was seriously considering Pavel’s question.

“Because you used to live on a starship and save hundreds of people’s lives in one shift.”

“Oh.”

He was probably right. The amount of work they had to do every day was still sometimes enough to keep them busy for a while, but the _quality_ of that work, compared to where they came from, felt a lot like going backwards in time. Pavel toed his boots off, letting his feet stretch and cool off in the evening air. When he looked back at Hikaru he had resumed his typical way of staring at the fire, like he was looking past it. If Pavel didn’t know him so well he would have thought that Hikaru was thinking about something very serious, but now he knew that this was what it looked like when he was trying to keep his mind clear. So Pavel was free to keep asking him questions, if he wanted.

“Do you think this is how people lived on Earth thousands of years ago?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Pavel asked, “Aren’t we basically hunter-gatherers.”

“I don’t think it counts when we have all this knowledge of the human race which those people didn’t have. They probably would have handled the situation differently.”

“How so?”

Pavel had finally managed to draw Hikaru’s attention away from the staring contest with the fire pit. He saw how Hikaru’s face softened when their eyes met, to something less serious and more thoughtful and maybe a little friendly.

“Like they wouldn’t have built the kind of things we did, because the concepts didn’t exist yet.”

“Damn. I didn’t realize that.”

He looked up above where he was sitting, at their little cabin on stilts. How many centuries of home building had it taken for this idea to exist, he wondered. And it wasn’t even that nice, it was just enough to block the suns from above them and keep out the rats from below. Life in the past must have really, really sucked, if Pavel was supposed to consider himself privileged in their situation.

“Do you think we’re lucky?”

“No,” Hikaru shook his head, “I think it would be way better to be in the past and have no conception of advanced technology. Better than whatever the hell this is.”

Pavel couldn’t think of anything else to say. Their conversation was nearing a little too close to the edge of things that would only make them upset. He tried to find comfort in the silence, the way Hikaru always seemed to, while the fire continued to wane and the third sun dipped down behind the trees. Eventually Hikaru stood up, dusted himself off, and reached out his hand towards Pavel. Pavel knew that as soon as he took it he would be deciding to let this day end.

So he did. He gave up on feeling productive and let himself be pulled to his feet, and taken up to bed.

 

_Day ?_

“I’m hungry,” Pave whined, and Hikaru mumbled something against his collarbone, sounding half-asleep. Pavel pushed at his shoulder. “Wake up.”

“What, Pavel.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow,” Hikaru groaned, shifting a little bit. They’d long since pushed their mats together on the floor, so they didn’t have to move apart in order to fall asleep. Hikaru turned onto his back next to Pavel, their bodies still touching at the hip.

“I won’t sleep if I’m so hungry.”

“So you propose that neither of us sleep and instead go outside and make something to eat which will keep us up even longer.”

Pavel huffed, and pushed up onto his elbows. It was too dark to make any sort of pleading face at Hikaru. He had to find another way to get what he wanted.

“Don’t you have any kindness for the person who just gave you such a great orgasm?”

“God, is this what you’d be like in a relationship,” Hikaru asked. Even though he complained, he was definitely waking up, now. He turned on his side again and snaked his arm across Pavel’s waist. “Why don’t I just try to put you to sleep?”

“Because I’m _hungry._ ”

Hikaru groaned again but thankfully that was the last time Pavel had needed to complain, and he finally sat up. They pulled their slacks on and made their way outside, jumping down barefoot from the cabin to start the fire again. Pavel was standing with his arms crossed over his chest, somehow _shivering_ in what used to be the hottest weather he’d ever experienced. He waited impatiently for Hikaru to get the fire started, and looked up at the night sky.

The clouds had gone since that one day that it rained, and none had come back since then. Instead the sky was clear and blank and dark, except--

“I think I see a star,” Pavel said.

“That’s not possible.” Hikaru squatted next to the fire pit, trying to coax some smoke out of the wood. “The suns are too close for any stars to be visible.”

“Then why do I see one.”

“Because you’re hungry and you’re seeing things.”

Hikaru blew on the fire until it finally lit, and the smoke slowly curled up into the sky, but Pavel was focused on the star.

“I’m sure I’m not seeing things.”

“Well it can’t be a star, I told you, that’s physically impossible on this planet. It has to be something else.”

Pavel turned to look at him and tried to think of the best way to express how tired he was of Hikaru’s permanently negative attitude. Hikaru added more wood to the fire, pushing it around a little bit, and then he paused, went completely still. And he looked up at Pavel, eyes blown wide.

_It has to be something else._

Hikaru jumped to his feet and they both looked back up at the sky, at the shining speck of light which had never been there before. They watched closely, holding their breath, until it started to get bigger, and they realized that the light was blinking.

“Get the ray gun,” Hikaru told him. Pavel was scrambling up into the cabin before he’d even finished his sentence, feeling around in the dark for the ray gun that they’d saved from their survival kit. Thank god, he thought, thank god thank _god_ he hadn’t taken it apart that day with the rest of their things. He tripped trying to get back down, and Hikaru hadn’t moved at all from where he was staring wide-eyed at the sky. It was as if he believed that the light would disappear if he dared to look away.

Pavel felt himself shaking as he pushed himself back to his feet, nearly breaking out into a run between the trees. He could sense Hikaru following him without having to look, and together they rushed out into the open where they could shoot the help signals straight into the empty sky. His hands shook while he ran and he nearly dropped the gun a few times before Hikaru grabbed his arm to stop him.

“Here should be fine. Shoot it,” Hikaru ordered, breathing fast and heavy, and Pavel held the gun above his head with both hands, arms trembling so bad that he couldn’t seem to keep them straight. The harder he tried to keep still the more difficult it became, and underneath the pounding of his ears he realized that he was crying.

Suddenly Hikaru was behind him, chest coming up against Pavel’s shivering back. He raised his arms and wrapped his hands around Pavel’s, around the gun, and pulled the trigger.

 

-

 

They were beamed onto a starship, much smaller than the Enterprise, but a Starfleet vessel nonetheless, thank _fuck_ . It housed a team of scientists that had been sent out to their little planet to determine if it would be able to host a starbase. Pavel hadn’t believed it when he learned that they’d managed to be rescued by a starship that was sent specifically _to_ that planet. It all seemed too lucky.

To be fair, though, he’d had trouble believing anything that happened in the minutes after he shot the ray gun into the sky. Everything was so radically different once they were beamed onto the ship that his brain couldn’t make sense of the two realities being part of the same sequence. He was so overwhelmed that day that Pavel figured he’d just repressed most of it for his own sake. But he remembered bits and pieces, being rushed to the ship’s small medical bay, kicking and screaming and having to be strapped down to the bed, throwing up any food they tried to give him, and feeling so, so cold.

The ship’s doctor put him and Hikaru in separate rooms for some reason, so Pavel was alone the first time he woke up with a clear head.

“Hi there,” somebody said, and Pavel tried to move his arms so he could rub the sleep from his eyes but quickly realized he was still strapped to the bed.

“I’ll take those off if you promise not to attack me again.”

Pavel settled for blinking his eyes again and again until he could make out the person he was talking to. Finally she walked closer, standing over his bed. Her blue uniform with the little cross inside her badge told him that she was the CMO, and she had on a white lab coat too which stood out against her dark skin. Pavel felt himself staring at the braids in her hair, and after a few minutes he realized he still hadn’t responded.

“I won’t move,” he said, and his voice sounded weak and hoarse compared to hers. He wondered if that was what he sounded like this whole time. She smiled.

“I’ll be surprised if you do with the sedatives you’re on.”

But she still removed the straps from his arms and legs, and Pavel shifted in the biobed, looking for a more comfortable position.

“What ship is this?” He asked, laying on his side now in the fetal position. He still felt so cold. “Where are we?”

“You’re on the USS Curiosity. It’s just a research ship, so we had to turn around to take you to the nearest starbase that can care for you and your friend.”

“My friend,” Pavel repeated, “Where is he?”

“In the other room. We don’t know what your health conditions are yet, so it’s standard procedure to keep you separated.”

Pavel let his eyes fall closed. He wondered how Hikaru was doing in the other room, if he was cold, too. If his throat was burning from trying and failing to eat last night. He wondered if Hikaru was able to make sense of all of this.

Maybe it was just a dream. Pavel could have gotten sick again, another one of his heat strokes that made him feel cold sometimes. This could just be a dream, made to feel long in his sleep, but in a few hours the suns would rise and the cabin would heat up and Pavel would wake up again and forget he was ever on the USS Curiosity.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by the CMO again.

“I need to give you an IV since you won’t eat anything yet.”

The needle entering his arm felt so real, Pavel could only think that he’d never felt such real sensations in any of his dreams before.

 

-

 

Pavel called his mother from the medbay of the USS Curiosity, an audio-only call, because he didn’t want her to see what he looked like and he didn’t want her to see where he was. He just wanted her to know he was alive.

She already did, probably. His status must have been updated in the Starfleet database and she probably got the notification that he was no longer _Missing, Presumed Dead_ , and was now _Active Duty, Medical Leave_ . Because that was apparently the closest status option to _just got rescued from a shitty dusty rock in the middle of space after 15 months and now lives in the hospital on a liquid diet_.

The call took forever to place. Pavel felt himself sweating in his hospital gown, the first time he’d sweat since he got here. Finally they were connected and she picked up.

“ _Hello?_ ”

Pavel realized as soon as he heard her voice that he hadn’t heard or spoken Russian in more than a year. It made his already shaky voice even worse as he said,

“ _Hi mama_.”

“ _Pavel? Oh Pavel. Oh my love. I knew when I saw that you were alive that my prayers were answered. I knew I hadn’t lost you. I knew I hadn’t._ ”

He felt tears spilling over onto his cheeks as he realized where he’d gotten his optimism from, that optimism that kept him alive for fifteen months.

“ _Where are you?_ ” she asked, “ _Are you safe?_ ”

“ _Yes I’m on a starship. They’re taking care of me._ ”

Through the rest of the conversation Pavel couldn’t stop crying, and he heard as his mother’s voice lost its steadiness too. But thank god she never tried to ask him what had happened. She didn’t ask for any details. Because Pavel was sure that he wouldn’t be able to tell the story right. Especially hearing her voice through the call, he started to feel like none of it had even happened.

“ _I thought of you every moment, my love, every second. I knew you would find your way back._ ”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Pavel choked on the words, and he didn’t think he could last much longer on the call before he completely lost his grip on his emotions. “ _Thank you for praying for me._ ”

 

-

 

As soon as Pavel’s brain stopped being convinced that he was dreaming, which happened around the same time that he heard his mother’s voice for the first time in over a year, he was no longer able to approach everything with skepticism and all of a sudden he couldn’t control any of his emotions at all.

The first time he ate a solid meal on the starbase they were transferred to he cried so hard he had to take minutes-long breaks in between every bite. It was oatmeal. He cried his eyes out eating oatmeal. At the very least nobody had seen him do it, since he was still basically in quarantine during the first week.

Once they’d cleared him of any potential diseases (which was secretly a disappointment, because now Pavel Chekov would never see fame in Starfleet’s alien diseases textbook) they gave him his own quarters in the medical complex. He had obligatory daily checkups where they gave him nutritional supplements and skin regeneration and _dental work,_ of all things. He was assigned to a trauma counselor and a series of extracurricular activities that were presumably supposed to keep him from sitting inside with his own memories and going insane.

The USS Curiosity had gone to the trouble of taking them to a starbase where their medical institution specialized in treating this type of patient. The complex housed victims of tragedy, orphans, prisoners of war, and--apparently the term was-- _castaways_. That’s what he and Hikaru were filed under. Although there were so many patients that the two of them hardly crossed paths.

They didn’t have the same counselor, or go to the same activities, or live on the same floor, even. Pavel asked his counselor about this and she explained to him that it was standard procedure to separate them, because continued contact could prove to be triggering. Pavel thought that was bullshit and he went ahead and told her that he thought so.

But maybe it was just that he missed Hikaru enough that he was convinced it _would_ be good for him, if they were going through this together. It could just be that Pavel was selfish. He considered the idea that maybe it would be triggering for Hikaru, if not for him, and tried to let that be enough to accept that they were separated.

Not a lot triggered him, really. There was nothing on that starbase that reminded him of the past fifteen months, no smells or sounds or tastes or feelings that transported him back there. There was just one thing he went out of his way to avoid, really, and that was his own reflection. As soon as he was moved into a private quarters he covered up all of the mirrors, hanging sheets all over the walls. Seeing what he looked like was just too much, for some reason.

The first time it had happened was in the hospital bathroom after he’d gotten here. He saw himself and for a second wondered if there wasn’t a window in the room and he wasn’t looking at a complete stranger. Pavel was never someone who could tan. He would only burn and then be pink for a few days and then go right back to white, maybe with just a few freckles to show for it. But after enough time spent on a planet with three suns burning his skin every single day he was unrecognizable. The light color of his eyes looked crazy against his dark face. His hair hadn’t been cut all that recently but it still wasn’t long enough to curl. He had no idea who this person was. So he didn’t look in the mirror again after that.

He figured that after enough time, after enough dermal regeneration and when his hair grew out and he gained enough weight, he could peek behind the sheet hanging in his bathroom and hope to see someone he recognized.

 

-

 

It was hard not seeing Hikaru. It got harder everyday, to talk to people who had no idea what he went through, knowing that there _was_ one person on the starbase who knew exactly how he felt. And maybe it was more than that. At night in his soft bed surrounded by pillows and blankets, he felt almost unbearably alone. He couldn’t help but imagine Hikaru next to him, sometimes. The bed was certainly big enough for both of them. He imagined them doing the things they used to do before, but they would be different now, maybe even better. Here they could shower and brush their teeth and the mattress wouldn’t scrape somebody’s back while they rutted against each other. With the climate controlled inside they could probably go for hours without anyone getting too warm and forcing them to separate. Here there was a comfortable bed and a couch and all kinds of tables and countertops that Hikaru could lift Pavel up on. There was a shower and a bathtub and cool bathroom tiles that Pavel imagined his knees against.

And there were other things, too, that they could get if they wanted. They could try all of the different kinds of sex that weren’t available to them back then, when all they had were their dry mouths and even drier hands. Pavel imagined having Hikaru inside of him. He wondered if Hikaru wanted that, if he wanted to fuck him into his soft mattress, or bend him over the kitchen table or crowd him against the wall of the shower underneath the warm spray.

He realized, bitterly, that it might be best if he just let his fantasies be fantasies. Maybe they were going to recover from this and move on and treat the things that happened between them as just a result of their circumstance.

It wasn’t like they’d ever said _I love you_ or anything like that, and Pavel tried to remind himself of that fact, of the non-romantic nature of their relationship. But there were some memories which came back to him when he was alone, memories like the day Pavel finally broke down and Hikaru held him in his arms for hours, rocking him slowly back and forth while he whispered _I’m here_. Like the conversations they would have sometimes, about anything and everything, and the way Hikaru always listened to him like he had valuable things to say, never laughed at him for thinking something unconventional. There was that night when it finally rained, the way Hikaru held his hand as they stood under the warm raindrops, even though he didn’t have to.

Pavel spent almost an entire night thinking about when they saw that starship in the distance and he was too emotional to hold the ray gun straight, the way Hikaru stood behind him and covered Pavel’s shaking hands with his own and pulled the trigger.

Those memories he kept, close to his heart and secret, more secret than all of the sex fantasies.

 

-

 

He finally saw Hikaru across the gardens of the medical complex and very nearly cried as soon as he spotted him, but he was getting better at handling his emotions now and successfully pushed it back down. Still, he ran over to meet him. Once Hikaru saw him too and they were staring at each other and Pavel was getting closer, he realized that he really had no idea what the hell to say to him. So he just said,

“Hi.”

“Hi yourself,” Hikaru said, and he smiled, and the sight of it made Pavel’s knees weak. He looked amazing, and healthy, and his smile looked so real and genuine and Pavel realized that it was because of _him_ that Hikaru had smiled so beautifully, and he had to remember how to breathe.

They just stood there for a few more seconds, almost like they needed time to process one another’s existence in this new location. Finally Hikaru shook his head, smile fading a little.

“They told me it’s better if we recover separately. I guess I was afraid I would get in trouble for coming to find you.”

“I won’t say anything if you don’t,” Pavel blurted out, maybe too fast. He felt like he was tripping over his words.

“It’s a bullshit theory, isn’t it? I mean, you’re the only one who really gets what I’m going through. And vice versa. Shouldn’t we be together?”

 _We should_ , Pavel thought, _we should be together. God how I wish we could be together again._

It took everything he had to keep those feelings inside, tucked under his chin so they wouldn’t come out of his mouth. He plastered a smile over his face instead and nodded, and together they found a bench in the garden that was a little more out of sight. They talked for what must have been hours, and not even about their shared trauma. Somehow they still found a way to talk about anything, here where they had the option of other people for company.

Talking to Hikaru made Pavel feel better than any of his therapeutic activities did. Pavel wasn’t able to stop himself from admitting it, but when Hikaru said he felt the same it made something glow warm and soft in his chest.

“I mean some of the stuff they make us do I get, but other things it seems like they just want to keep us busy.”

“What is your primary activity?” Pavel asked. The primary activity was the one assigned by your counselor as the focus of your therapy, the one you had to do every single day. Hikaru’s skin had lightened enough that Pavel could see him blush a little bit at the question.

“Drawing.”

Pavel felt his mouth fall open.

“You are so lucky.”

“Why, what do you have to do?”

“Yoga,” Pavel deadpanned, and Hikaru stared at him totally blank faced for a few seconds, probably trying to imagine in his head what Pavel must look like doing yoga, and then he burst out laughing.

“That’s so good. I can’t believe that.”

Pavel rolled his eyes, but it was all for show. He didn’t care if they sat there and talked about every embarrassing thing Pavel had ever experienced, as long as they were together.

“Does the drawing help?”

“It kind of does. It’s good to do something with my hands at least.”

“Are you any good at it?” Pavel asked.

Hikaru raised an eyebrow.

“Are you any good at yoga?”

 

-

 

Hikaru’s drawings were amazing. Somehow the same hands that carved and cut open trees, the hands that built them a house and started fires, the hands that were cut and burned and bruised over and over again, could take a small piece of charcoal in between two fingers and and create a masterpiece. The amount of detail in them required not just a steady hand but an incredible eye, too. They blew Pavel away.

At his class he drew mostly still life, which he showed Pavel one evening after sneaking down to his quarters. Stereotypical stuff, like bowls of fruit or vases of flowers. He had a landscape, of little boats out on the water, which Pavel loved so much that Hikaru let him keep it.

And then he turned to the back of his sketchbook and showed Pavel some more drawings, ones he’d done on his own, he said. At first Pavel didn’t understand, until he started to recognize them. The little cabin on stilts against a backdrop of fat trees. The river where they got water, with a scrawny guy kneeling down next to it who Pavel assumed must have been him. A sunset with two other suns in the sky above it. Pavel traced his finger along the shades of charcoal that made up the sky, and accidentally smudged the colors, leaving a gray fingerprint in the middle of the second sun.

“Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Hikaru said softly. “I can make another. I just make these to try and get the images out of my head.”

Pavel nodded, and he felt his eyes well up with tears. He stared down at the drawing of the three suns, willing himself not to cry, but even when the tears spilled out onto his cheeks Hikaru didn’t say anything.

He flipped through the pages and showed him a few more: the inside of their cabin, which Pavel had almost forgotten the look of it, the clouds that had collected for so long above the treetops, Pavel’s face turned up to the rain. The last drawing, of Pavel in the rain, eyes closed, was too much. It brought too many memories with it. At first he told himself that it this was him being triggered, but even after Hikaru apologized and closed the sketchbook and took his cue to leave, Pavel’s heart still hurt.

He realized, later, that he hadn’t been triggered. It wasn’t the memory of their trauma which had hurt him so much. Looking at Hikaru’s drawing of him, the beauty he managed to give to Pavel’s scrawny, desperate features, it triggered only memories of the way they used to be. He hated that a part of him wished they could be back in that cabin again, in that place where the two of them made sense together, that place where they wanted each other.

Instead he was here, and he was healing, and he was grateful, but at the same time Pavel could feel his heart breaking into a million little pieces.

He taped the drawing of the boats on the water to the sheet that covered his bathroom mirror.

 

-

 

The crew of the Curiosity had alerted the Enterprise as soon as Pavel and Hikaru identified themselves, but once they were admitted into the treatment center they were required to stay there for six weeks. Pavel wondered what the news must have been like to the crew back on the Enterprise. If they were relieved, or shocked, if they had already grieved the loss of their two officers by then. He thought about what he knew about Jim Kirk, and let himself believe that they never stopped looking.

Once they were discharged and allowed to return to the Enterprise his beliefs were more or less confirmed. More people than Pavel thought knew his name were waiting for them in the transporter room. They didn’t cheer, which would have been weird, and thankfully they didn’t go silent at the sight of him, which would have been worse. Instead everyone just smiled and some of them applauded, as if staying alive had been some great achievement.

The Captain stepped up onto the transporter pad and pulled Pavel into what was maybe the tightest hug he’d ever been given. He couldn’t even focus on whatever Jim was trying to say to him with all the effort it took to breathe. He heard Hikaru laughing at the sight, though, and Jim must have heard it too because he released Pavel and immediately went after him.

Everyone else was a little more normal about it. Pavel got a lot of handshakes, and pats on the back, and Spock actually _smiled_ at him. What really got to him was the way Nyota hugged him, not so tightly that he couldn’t get away, it was friendlier and more relaxed than that, and yet she didn’t let go for at least five minutes. He never even remembered getting much attention from her, outside of working together on the bridge, but something about how she greeted him was just so _her_ , with the way she managed to be both stern and gentle at once, and made him feel like he was really back on the ship again. She was the person that Pavel hugged back.

 

-

 

He really had no idea why, but Pavel’s body somehow remembered everything about living and working on the Enterprise. He had expected to feel awkward and new again, like he did four years before when he was fresh out of the Academy and thrown headfirst into it all. Instead it was like he had just pressed play again as soon as he was on board. His feet remembered every route from his quarters to the mess to the bridge to the medbay. His fingers remembered how to use the controls, the same ones he hadn’t touched in nearly seventeen months. His mouth remembered the script for the shipwide announcements that he sometimes had to make. It was like all of these actions hadn’t been forgotten but tucked away in a box and stored somewhere in his brain.

It was eerie how easily he clicked back into place on the ship and at the helm, as if nothing had happened at all. It must have been even more strange for the rest of the crew. The people who still looked at him with wide eyes sometimes, like he wasn’t Pavel Chekov but an intruder who insisted on being called by the same name. Either that, or they looked at him like he might break if they weren’t careful.

Pavel wasn’t sure which of those made him more uncomfortable, to be treated like a stranger or like a patient who got discharged too early from the ICU.

At first he just tried to pretend that nothing had changed at all, which he quickly realized was impossible. Even when people stopped commenting on how different he looked, older or tanner or stronger or whatever the fuck else, even when the Captain stopped making jokes about how he’d lost most of his accent and now just sounded like a slightly more exotic Hikaru. Once all of the comments about how much he’d changed were finally replaced by new conversation topics, Pavel realized that he didn’t even have the option of pretending everything was back to normal.

He realized that nothing would be _normal_ again. Not like it was before.

He remembered his counselor on the starbase telling him to accept the development of a new normal. That he was going to be different, which meant he was going to feel and do and say things differently, and he should expect for his whole life to be different, too. Holding onto the idea of returning back to how things were--she’d had to tell him this multiple times over--would only cause him more pain.

So Pavel finally stopped pretending that even though he was back on the Enterprise as Ensign Chekov, it wasn’t going to be the same Enterprise and he wasn’t going to be the same Ensign Chekov. Once he could do that, it was easier to let things change.

He went ahead had Doctor McCoy assign him to a therapist, something he’d promised to do as soon as he was back on the ship and didn’t. He rearranged the furniture in his quarters, pushed the bed to the opposite wall and shifted everything else around and put Hikaru’s drawing of the boats in the picture frame that used to hold his Starfleet diploma. Lying on top of his bed and staring now at a different section of the ceiling, he remembered that night when he and Hikaru were listing off all of the things they never did and most of what he came up with was only work-related. So he got out of bed and went onto the ship’s activities database and signed up for yoga classes too.

 

-

 

“I was worried they would put us on different shifts, you know, when we got back,” Hikaru said in the turbolift one morning. Pavel had been up for hours already. He wondered if Hikaru still had trouble sleeping full nights.

“They kept trying to separate us, I figured it would become a pattern,” he continued, and he wasn’t usually this talkative in the mornings. Pavel realized it was maybe because he hadn’t said anything at all yet. He looked over at him and he could see concern on Hikaru’s face. Hikaru’s face which was almost the same as it used to be, save for the little bit of his tan which still lingered and the scar above his eyebrow from when he was trying to secure two planks of wood together and one snapped and hit him on the forehead. To anyone else he was back to normal; the tan could just be from shore leave or something. Only Pavel would notice the scar. Only Pavel knew how he got it.

He realized quickly that he was staring, and that Hikaru was definitely worried for him now.

“Do you still find it hard to sleep through the night?” Pavel asked, and Hikaru frowned.

“Do _you?_ ”

“Yes. Why else would I bring it up.”

Hikaru sighed a little, and it looked like he was about to say something but the doors swished open and they were on the bridge. Pavel just shook his head dismissively, signalling to him to let it go, and Hikaru gave him one last worried look before they found their seats at the helm.

Pavel was glad nobody tried to separate the two of them on the Enterprise. It would have made things so much worse, to be all alone, when he already felt like a foreigner in a place he knew so well. When people said things about Pavel’s looks (different) or his size (bigger) or his accent (or lack thereof) Hikaru would immediately shoot them down. If it was a year and a half earlier, Pavel would’ve hated the idea that anyone felt compelled to come to his rescue like that. Now he liked it. He liked that way Hikaru defended him. It was maybe the only part of this _new normal_ the two of them had which undeniably felt like a good thing.

 

-

 

After their shift that day Hikaru told him that if he ever had trouble sleeping at night, to call him, or just come over to his quarters. Pavel knew what he meant, that Hikaru was offering to be there to talk to. So he nodded and said that he would do that next time, even though it was a lie.

Pavel knew he couldn’t trust himself at night, if he called Hikaru, or worse, went to his quarters, where Hikaru’s bed was, where he might casually answer the door half-dressed, and invite him inside to _talk_ as if they didn’t spend all those months sleeping together. He didn’t want to risk doing something stupid. He didn’t want to hear how Hikaru would reject him. Especially after he’d already successfully broken his own heart over it without bothering to ask. Having the actual words of Hikaru’s rejection, ones that would sit around in his brain for eternity, wasn’t worth the closure.

He couldn’t go over there, couldn’t call him, especially not at night. Not at night when he was vulnerable and lonely, when he laid in his bed awake and his mind was full of image after image of Hikaru next to him, on top of him. He just knew that he was bound to let something slip. So even that very night, when he woke up at 0430 and remembered Hikaru’s insistence to call him in situations exactly like this, Pavel just rolled over and tried his best to go back to sleep.

Sleep never came to him that morning, either.

 

-

 

It wasn’t until a few nights of near-successful sleep later when Pavel was wide awake like that again, this time at 0200. He gave up and got out of bed, instead going over to his desk to write his mother an email. He had almost finished telling her every new development since his last message two days ago when he got a request for an audio call. From Hikaru Sulu.

Pavel cursed the fact that he’d forgotten to set his user as offline. He didn’t think anyone would be up to check. After a few rings he cursed again and picked up.

“I thought I told you to call me when you can’t sleep,” Hikaru said, and he sounded like he was wide awake, too. There were no traces of sleep at all in his voice, which made Pavel worry.

“Speak for yourself. What are you doing awake.”

“Probably the same thing you are.”

“Writing your mother an email?”

“Okay, not the same thing.”

Pavel let the call go silent while he tried to think of what to say. What the fuck _could_ he say, at this point? The only things on his mind were all things he refused to admit out loud. Finally he heard Hikaru clearing his throat awkwardly from the other end of the call.

“You know, before you picked up I was beginning to think you were avoiding me,” he said. There was an undertone to his voice like Hikaru definitely still thought Pavel was avoiding him.

“I’m not, I swear,” Pavel blurted out, “It’s just that...I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on with me.” He laughed, and before he could stop himself something came out, something he swore he wouldn’t tell anyone, “Sometimes I miss the way I was on that planet. Is that weird?”

“Maybe.”

“I just knew exactly who I was, even though we were in hell. And now I don’t know anymore.”

Hikaru was quiet for a few seconds, but those seconds felt like hours.

“I think I understand how you feel,” he finally said, and Pavel laughed again out of self-pity more than anything else. He didn’t understand how anyone could have heard him say that, that there were things he missed about being stranded and left for dead, and not immediately be turned off by it.

“No, I really do. It’s not like I’m not having my _own_ identity crisis over here.”

“You are?”

“Of course I am. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I miss talking to you. Even though we still see each other every day. I miss the way we used to talk about things when it was just the two of us.”

Pavel felt something catch in his throat and stay there. He stared down at his desk, waiting for Hikaru to realize that he was venturing out of platonic territory and change the subject. But he just kept talking. Pavel couldn’t remember him ever being so talkative like this.

“I miss the way you always found something to talk about. The questions you would think of to ask me. And those little games we would come up with, even though--” Hikaru laughed a little and sighed, “even though we could be so fucking morbid sometimes. Do you remember that?”

Pavel rested his chin against his hand. He took a deep breath before he replied.

“Yes, I remember.”

“It’s your turn,” Hikaru said, and Pavel felt his throat tighten around the emotions that had gotten stuck inside. Any more and they would threaten to pour out through his mouth. “Tell me what you miss about our fifteen months in hell.”

“This is messed up.” Pavel’s voice was all rough and gravelly now, and it finally cracked when he said, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Okay, alright, what _do_ you want,” Hikaru asked, softer now after he undoubtedly heard Pavel starting to break. Pavel slipped his hand over his face, and tried to take another breath, and wished he didn’t when the inhale broke into a little sob. And then everything came out at once.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he repeated to himself, even though he knew Hikaru could hear him, “I don’t know why I can’t be okay with this. With how things are. It’s as if things aren’t so much better for us now, I’m still wishing I was back on that planet sometimes just so I could be with you. Isn’t that messed up? Isn’t that so messed up?”

“Pavel, I--”

“Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything, please--”

“I didn’t know that’s how you felt,” Hikaru finally managed to get out. Pavel let out the breath he’d been holding.

“Of course it’s how I feel.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Hikaru asked.

“Why didn’t _you?_ ” Pavel asked him back, even though he knew it was a stupid thing to say and an obvious attempt to avoid the question. How could he have said anything as they were passed from starship to starbase to starship, when he was overwhelmed and overfed and when he was hearing a thousand different theories from his counselor about the emotional side effects of trauma? But then again, how could he have expected Hikaru to say something if he was going through it all, too?

“I didn’t want you to feel like you had to choose me,” Hikaru said, so clear and direct that it pulled Pavel back out of his own broken thoughts. “You deserve to have the life you wanted for yourself, before any of this happened. The life that I wouldn’t have been a part of.”

“Bullshit,” Pavel spat out, “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“No Pavel, it’s true.”

“I will never have that life. I will never get to live like this didn’t happen to me.”

“You deserve the chance to try.”

“Shut up,” Pavel said.

“What was I supposed to think, Pavel? They forced us apart and then when we finally saw each other again we just pretended like it never happened. Was I supposed to chase after you? Stay in your room even when you asked me to leave? Is that what you wanted?”

“No,” Pavel replied quietly, feeling stupid. He didn’t even know what he would have wanted Hikaru to do. He must have been too occupied back then, with deciding what Hikaru felt without even asking him, and then breaking his own heart over it.

He rubbed at his eyes. About a minute passed with nothing but the faint sound of Hikaru breathing on the other side of the call before he finally said,

“Will you come here.”

“Why,” Pavel asked.

“Because I miss you,” Hikaru said, “Because it was a mistake to let our relationship become what it was without ever talking about it.”

“How could you think that I want to live my life without you?”

Hikaru took a deep breath, and Pavel could hear the way it started to shake.

“Please just come here.”

“Okay,” Pavel replied, “okay. I will.”

He hung up the call and left before he thought too hard about it, not even stopping to get dressed or check what he looked like in the mirror. He wandered out into the corridor in his socks and pajamas, made his way to Hikaru’s quarters in the near-darkness. Hikaru must have been waiting at the door for him, the way he had it swish open as soon as Pavel rang the bell to reveal that he was standing _right_ there. Pavel didn’t even think. He had to stop thinking. He took two steps forward, into Hikaru’s quarters, and kept going until he was in his arms.

 

-

 

Pavel had forgotten how it felt. To be in Hikaru’s arms. He had forgotten the feeling of his hands across his skin, the easy way his mouth found Hikaru’s without having to open his eyes. The sounds Hikaru made, soft moans and quiet sighs and sometimes laughter. It was almost like he was experiencing it all for the first time again. All the nights he spent dreaming about being with Hikaru, he had been remembering it wrong. Or leaving things out. He considered, too, the possibility that it was never like this.

Kind of like the way his body remembered how to live on the Enterprise even when his brain was experiencing it differently. Exactly like that, Pavel realized.

Pavel’s body remembered how to be with Hikaru, how to kiss him and touch him and how to turn him on and how to make him come. He could have done it without any real conscious thought; he probably had plenty of times already. Except this time was different. This time they were in Hikaru’s quarters, in his bed and surrounded by his things. Pavel hadn’t considered what the effect was, of being in such a desolate environment, on the quality of the sex they had. Here they were comfortable, safe. This was where Hikaru lived, where everything smelled like him. On this ship where they woke up everyday with a million different things they could spend their time doing, as opposed to waking up and only having the choice to keep surviving or to give up and die. Here they had their entire lives ahead of them, they had the promise of the rest of their lives and the rest of the universe.

And here in Hikaru’s bed they still chose each other, and that made it different.

Every assumption Pavel had made about how Hikaru felt, the bricks he’d used to build a wall around his own heart, turned out to be false. Hikaru wanted him. He still wanted him even after they were rescued, after they tried to fit themselves back into their own lives. He still chose him even though he wasn’t the only option anymore.

Pavel could barely hold back the tears that welled up in his eyes at Hikaru’s words, at the sound of him saying over and over how much he’d missed him, how much he thought about this, how much he wanted him. It was more than Pavel had ever hoped he would say. Finally when Pavel broke, and a tear rolled onto his cheek, he was worried that Hikaru would stop and pull away like when he had reacted like that to his sketchbook. Instead he kissed the wetness of Pavel’s cheek, pushed his knees up to his chest and thrust into him slower and deeper. And then Hikaru’s mouth came close to Pavel’s ear, and he told him all of those things again.

 

-

 

It made Pavel feel better to learn that Hikaru had kept drawing, too, to see the white bedsheet hung over his bathroom mirror, to realize that he would never be the same, either. There were stacks of sketchbooks on the table by his bedside and on his desk and another one on top of his dresser. It had only been a few months since they were put into that treatment center. Pavel imagined Hikaru coming home from his shifts every evening and spending hours making those beautiful drawings, filling up book after book and covering the skin of his fingers with charcoal.

Hikaru caught him staring that morning at the stack on his bedside table.

“I still do it, I don’t know why,” he said, sounding a little bit embarrassed, “I tried to go back to my old hobbies but they just aren’t really the same anymore.”

Pavel rested his cheek against the center of Hikaru’s chest, where his heartbeat was. Hikaru’s hand traced along the skin of his shoulder and down the side of his arm and Pavel could see there, on his wrist, the scar from when he burned himself trying to cook meat over an open fire for the first time. He smiled.

“I still do yoga. If it makes you feel any better.”

“It does.”

“Do you think everyone who was a patient there leaves with a weirdly obsessive hobby?”

“I think so. I’m sure that’s why they do it.”

Pavel hummed. He was probably right. Those six weeks they spent in treatment were intended to help them recover physically and mentally, but also to prepare them for the reality that full recovery was never a guarantee. To prepare them to become different people with different thoughts and emotions and weird little therapeutic hobbies.

Hikaru’s palm settled against the back of Pavel’s neck, holding him there against his chest, and Pavel closed his eyes. Maybe being on the ship made things different, being in a soft bed and not feeling constantly hungry and thirsty and exhausted from the heat, knowing now that they were going to live. But he couldn’t forget the moments that happened between them, the things that had been real. The memories collected in Hikaru’s sketchbooks, those were all still real. Regardless of how they ended up together, whether it was out of desperation or boredom or whatever else, Pavel couldn’t lie to himself anymore that it was something they’d be able to move on from.

They would never move on from it. They would have to become different people who lived different lives than the ones they had before. It was already happening. But now Pavel was here, safe in Hikaru’s bed, held under the warmth of his hands, and he knew that they were going to go through it together. That was all he needed to know.


End file.
